Archives de catégorie : Environment

FEASTING WILD de GinaRae LaCerva

A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods―and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursued.

FEASTING WILD:
In Search of the Last Untamed Food
by GinaRae LaCerva
Greystone Books, May 2020

Anthropologist and geographer GinaRae LaCerva’s fascination with hunting and gathering quickly exploded into a personal obsession that sent her on a quest to taste the wild foods we still eat and the ones we have forgotten: from wild boar in Borneo, to a lobster bake on an island in Maine, to gathering herbs near Kierkegaard’s grave in Copenhagen. She didn’t expect to find something much more profound—an untamable love affair and the elusive pleasure of simple sustenance. Along the way, she illuminates that the history of food is also the history of environmental conservation, examines the rapid transformation of wild food from nutritional necessity to luxury good, explores how this shift reflects our attempts to tame and commodify “natures” of all kinds, and ultimately finds that her own sense of adventure is just as unruly as the natural places she explores.
This impeccably researched narrative history uncovers something essential about what it means to love the planet in the age of extinction. Equal parts environmental history and adventure narrative, FEASTING WILD weaves together extensive field research and personal narrative to interrogate our concept of nature, investigate how our insatiable appetites have contributed to the current landscape of environmental crisis, and question what we might do about it now.

GinaRae LaCerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and award-winning writer who has traveled extensively to research a variety of environmental and food-related topics. A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, La Cerva holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Originally from New Mexico, she lives in New York.

BLOOM de Kenneth Oppell volume 1

A trilogy laced with inventive science fiction elements but rooted in our present world

BLOOM
by Kenneth Oppell
Knopf, publication 2020

BLOOM is the first book in a trilogy (book #2 HATCH and #3 THRIVE each to come a year after) laced with inventive science fiction elements but rooted in the present world.
With heart-stopping thrills (chainsaws, helicopter journeys, extraordinary dreams!), BLOOM introduces the world to a dangerous new plant species, and three brave kids who may be the only ones capable of fighting it. Anaya is pretty much allergic to the world. Pollen, trees, most foods, you name it. Her allergies leave her face puffy, her nose constantly filled with snot, and her eyes glued shut with gunk. Leave it to her ex-best friend Petra to develop an allergy to water yet remain beautiful and popular. But Petra, for her part, can’t bathe, can’t swim, can’t even step outside in the rain without breaking out in hives. After a mysterious new species of tall black grass invades their Canadian island town, neither Anaya nor Petra is affected by its strange side effects. Neither is Seth, a new boy at their school with secrets of his own. As the unlikely trio rushes to solve the mystery of these new plants before their effects become life-threatening to everyone around them, they soon discover that they may know less about this sinister infestation, and themselves, than they originally thought.
Ken’s signature fast-pace plotting, engaging characters, and high stakes come to life in this incredible new series – with some lessons in botany mixed in! This is Ken’s first trilogy since the hugely successful Airborn series (and Silverwing before that).

BLOWOUT de Rachel Maddow

Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy–Winner Take All

BLOWOUT:
Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
by Rachel Maddow
Crown, October 2019

Rachel Maddow’s Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe–from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea–exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West’s most important alliances. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, but ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson emerge as two of the past century’s most consequential corporate villains. The oil-and-gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, « like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature. »
This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest industry on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, « Democracy either wins this one or disappears. »

Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.

CARBON IDEOLOGIES de William T. Vollmann

A timely, eye-opening book about climate change and energy generation that focuses on the consequences of nuclear power production, from award-winning author William T. Vollmann

CARBON IDEOLOGIES
Viking

NO IMMEDIATE DANGER #1
April 2018

In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age, from poverty to violence to the dark soul of American imperialism as it has played out on the U.S./Mexico border. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come–the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins NO IMMEDIATE DANGER, the first volume of “Carbon Ideologies”, by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort. Featuring Vollmann’s signature wide learning, sardonic wit, and encyclopedic research, NO IMMEDIATE DANGER, whose title co-opts the reassuring mantra of official Japanese energy experts, builds up a powerful, sobering picture of the ongoing nightmare of Fukushima.

NO GOOD ALTERNATIVE #2
June 2018

The second volume of William T. Vollmann’s epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, where “America’s best friend” is not merely a fuel, but a “heritage.” Over the course of four years Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money. As with its predecessor, this volume seeks to understand and listen, not to lay blame–except in a few corporate and political cases where outrage is clearly due. Vollmann is a carbon burner just like the rest of us; he describes and quantifies his own power use, then looks around him, trying to explain to the future why it was that we went against scientific consensus, continually increasing the demand for electric power and insisting that we had no good alternative.

In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age, from poverty to violence to the dark soul of American imperialism as it has played out on the U.S./Mexico border.